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Let us turn our attention to that Divine
Presence within, which is both the center and the circumference of our
real being. It is the Infinite Presence which inhabits eternity
and finds a dwelling place in our own consciousness. We recognize
It as the only authority there is. We know we are one with It and
in It, for there is no separation from It. Our own consciousness
is the very depth and height of Its Being and is one with all that It
is. And so let it be.
- Ernest Holmes
CHAPTER ONE
The Science of Prayer
The perception of wholeness is the consciousness of healing! Let
us have this clear - we have no dogmatic belief! My opinion is not
necessarily yours, yours need not necessarily be mine. However,
there do seem to be certain fundamental ideas, which have been
discovered in the metaphysical field during the time of its existence
and which experience has verified. There are certain philosophic
truths and spiritual intuitions that the ages have contributed to the
sum total of our knowledge, just as there are certain scientific facts,
which, because they can be demonstrated and reproduced at will,
determine basic principles. These ideas and truths we share in
common.
Religious Science is based on the concept that the Universe is one
system and only one, not two; that it is ruled by law and impelled by
love; that there is a self-existent Cause which didn't make
Itself. God didn't make it, we didn't make it, it wasn't
made. The Truth is that which is. It is inconceivable to
think of a time when God began to be God, or Law began to be Law.
We neither create God nor Law.
There is, in my estimation, no God that thought of Himself or Itself as
beginning, or as creating Law, because in eternalities there is neither
a beginning nor an end. We do believe that there is an infinite
self-knowingness, which we call the Spirit. "Our Father which
art in Heaven," God, the first Cause, or This Thing Called
Life. We believe that this is personal, warm, colorful, and
responsive to that which communes with It, and that each of us is an
individualized center in It, without being an individual separate from
It. There is only One of whatever "It" is. We are
rooted in the One, which is an Infinite Unity objectively producing
limitless variety. Therefore, God is uniquely individual and
uniquely personal to each one of us. In other words, we are
uniquely individual to God, and God is uniquely personal to each one of
us. This is not a contradiction of logic or of mathematics.
It is an affirmation that all numbers start with the original digit of
one, and if you or I perceive that original one and its variations, we
perceive it only because it has a relationship to us, which must respond
at the level of our perception of it.
We did not put the mountains here. We perceive them because there
is, as Emerson said, "One Mind common to all individual men,"
or as Kant said, "there is awakened in us an intuition in a common
field." Berkeley stated, "there cannot be a perception
without a perceiver." Since there are many things which I do
not perceive there must be a perceiver to which, in which, and of which,
all things exist. We do progressively see more but we believe that
there is that within us which is the perceiver, the original perceiver
now uniquely individualized within Itself as each one of us. Each
of us is a center in the consciousness of God. Therefore, we
believe Spirit. I believe that we are not one in God or one with
God, but we are one of God. Although the identity is the
same in essence, it is not the same in degree. If there were a
sameness in degree, we would have already exhausted the possibility of
the Infinite and having done so our continual existence would be a
cosmic tragedy, because there would be no place to go and nothing to
see. Everything would have been used up.
We believe that as there is only One Spirit, there is only One Creative
Medium, a neutral, impersonal Law existing everywhere. You may
also call it the Soul of the Universe. It is not opposed to but
complementary to the Spirit. The Spirit is the Father and the Soul
is the Mother. The Greeks taught the idea of the pneuma, the
Spirit, and the psyche, the Soul or the womb of the universe. Some
schools of thought call it universal subjectivity. It is, we might
say, a universal subjectivity which is subconscious but not
unconscious. I am not referring to the subconscious or unconscious
of psychology.
We do not believe that there is any such thing as your individual
subconscious or subjective mind. We do believe, however, that each
one of us has an atmosphere in this universal field, which, because of
the action of Law, makes it appear as though we have an individual mind,
but we haven't. We believe everything that psychology teaches us
that we can prove to be true but we correlate that knowledge with a
greater concept.
Religious Science does not teach that there is an individual psyche or
an individual soul, or even that thee is an individual body. It
does teach that out of a vast universality the Spirit is individualized
as Spirit, as Soul, as Body, in a unique way as each one of us, which is
proven by the fact that no two thumb prints are alike. There is no
question about the logic of this. It keeps faith with the great
spiritual intuitions of the ages, and I have no doubt whatsoever that it
is true.
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